No, are you? You were probably wiened on the myth more than on fact about this guy and his "delo." Worse, you don't respond with reason but with emotion, so why waste time reasoning with you?
The Serbian literary language developed after the 1860's in cosmopolitan Belgrade, where it becamse known as the "Belgrade style." Urban intellectuals enriched the impoverished language with foreign words and more flexible sentence structure.
What Vuk proposed is the language he heard peasants speak. That's what made him so popular wiht Yugoslav communists later on, but fortunately Elmer Fudds of the world do not generally determine a country's literary language.
Vuk's elimination of the letter yat created two versions of the written language -- which resulted in serious, even catastrophic, complications. Until that time, the Serbian language was written the same way regardless which pronunciation you used -- ekavski or iyekavski. So, that was a setp backwards.
He introduced the letter "j" in order to make it more palatable to the Croatians and Slovenes, but in the process totally departed from any Serbian 1,000-year old tradition. The letter was not necessary.
What did Vuk really accomplish? Very few countries have phonetic languages and yet their litteracy rates are equivalent or higher than that among the Serbs. No advantage there. How phonetic a language is has no bearing whatsoever on how successful or powerful a country becomes. Japanese people write with four different alphabets daily, yet have no similar problems to what the Serbs have experienced.
Proposing that West Virginian local dialect becomes the nation's model official written language would not be received well. Neither would be a porposition to do the same with "ebonics." Just as "Cockney" English -- the spoken language of the "common folk" -- is not a serious pretender for English literary supremacy, one can say the same for Platt Deutsch in Germany. Yet, in Serbia, Vuk was trying to push precisely the "common folk" version of the language as Serbia's official written languge.
Contrary to what they fed you in school over there, Vuk managed to succeed only in pushing his decrepit version of the Cyrillic (for political reasons). The language of the pig farmers was luckily never entrenched as the official Serbian language.
I disagree with you on all counts. Vuk made the language more logical; he did not "bastardize" it. He merely reformed it. He did not impose his revised language on the people. It was vice versa - he simply adjusted the written language to the way it had already been spoken.
Changes in a language do occur on their own, and the populus accepts them. My friends (Serbs from Bosnia, in all cases) always laugh at the way I speak, not so much because of the accent but also because of the words I (and other "northerners") use; words which are not commonly used in other parts of Serbia. But, hey, that's the way WE speak.
Language experts claim that the purest Serbian is spoken in Hertsegovina. That may be so, but only some 5% of the Serbs are from Hertsegovina. What is the standard Serbian language anyway? And why are you even mentioning the Slovenes and the Croats? They had nothing to do with it. They had their own languages and were using the Latin alphabed, weren't they?